Automatic stereology of mean nuclear size of neurons using an active contour framework

The use of unbiased stereology to quantify structural parameters such as mean cell and nuclear size (area and volume) can be useful for a wide variety of biological studies. Here we propose a novel segmentation framework using an Active Contour Model to automate the collection of stereology from stained cells and other objects in tissue sections. This approach is demonstrated for stained brain sections from young adult Fischer 344 rats. Animals were perfused in-vivo with 4% paraformaldehyde and sectioned by frozen microtomy at an instrument setting of 40 μm. For each rat brain, a systematic-random set of sections through the entire substantia nigra pars compacta (SN) were immunostained to reveal tyrosine hydroxylase (TH)-immunopositive neurons. The novel framework applied an active contour (modified balloon snake) model with non-constant balloon force to automatically segment and quantify neuronal cell bodies by stereological point counting (SPC). Several contours were initialized in the image and based on the contour fit after 200 iterations classified as immunopositive (signal) or background contours in a sequential manner. Cell contours were determined in four steps based on several criteria, e.g., area of contour, dispersion measure, and degree of overlap. The image was automatically segmented according to the final contours. Using a point grid automatically generated at systematic-random orientations over the images, points hitting the segmented neural cell bodies were automatically counted. The final values from the automatic framework were compared with findings for ground truth (manual SPC). The results of this study show a strong agreement between data collected by the automatic framework and the ground truth (R² ≥ 0.95) with a 5× gain in time efficiency for the automatic SPC. These findings give strong support for future applications of pattern recognition for assessing stereological parameters of biological objects identified by high signal:noise stains.